The Foreign Service Journal, April 2008

War College, sees the Muslim extremists as suffering from ennui and rootlessness because of globalization, not unlike the conditions that fueled the growth of Nazism in Eur- ope after World War I. For his part, Alan Richards, an economist at the Army War College, notes that economic and social conditions such as urbanization, poverty and illiteracy produce disaffected youth living in ungoverned spaces from which jihadists can recruit. Answers as to why Muslims rebel are complex, vary according to place and circumstances and are far from being well understood. Rather than being unique, how- ever, the reasons are a subset of the explanations for why any society’s members rebel, developed by Ted Robert Gurr, Jack Goldstone and others. These factors include grievances caused by relative deprivation, an identified cause of the deprivation, alienated masses available for political mobilization and an alternative leadership that gives hope for success. Islam and the West The West plays a large role in political Islam, as both friend and foe. As the noted scholar Bernard Lewis recounts, the defeat of the Ottomans at the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683 launched a profound internal debate among Muslims as to “what went wrong” to account for this catastrophe at the hands of infidels. Attempts to fig- ure out why the Muslim world lags behind the West, at least in terms of economic and technological develop- ment, continue more than three centuries later. The “determinist” reply that nothing went wrong — what has happened is God’s will, and thus nothing is to be done — lost out long ago to answers favoring action: • The revivalists say the Muslim community has been insufficiently obedient to God’s will, and what is to be done is to return to greater piety; • The reformers believe that the Muslim world has failed to keep up with the West technologically, so the answer is to adopt its technology while preserving the tenets of Islam; and • The secularists view Islam as intrinsically dated and assert that its practice should be marginalized in order to pursue modernization. Iran since 1979 and Afghanistan under the Taliban are examples of the first perspective; Egypt and most of the Arab Gulf states represent the second; and Turkey and Bourguiba’s Tunisia reflect the third. For policymakers, it is important to understand that the matter is not settled. The debate continues both internationally and internally, even within each of these prototypical countries, and the categorization above pro- vides a framework to analyze developments. Still the question remains: Why has the West excelled economically while the Muslim world has been in decline for centuries? How can you explain the fact that the 57 countries making up the Organization of the Islamic Conference have an aggregate gross domestic product equivalent to that of Germany, even taking into account the oil boom? The answer is not Islam’s communitarian nature; after all, Mohammad was a trader and the bias is, if anything, toward free markets. Nor is it because of the prohibition of payment of interest (riba), which in any case has not been widely applied historically. Economic historian Timur Kuran argues that the answer is the dimming of intellectual curiosity with the closing of the Great Gates of Ijtihad. In order to preserve the orthodoxy, people over centuries have falsified their “preference curves;” that is, they have concealed their true beliefs in public discourse “lest they be accused of harboring animosity to Islam.” The result has been the failure to accommodate changes, especially in the educa- tional system: there are only 1,500 universities in OIC countries, compared to nearly 6,000 in the U.S. alone. Islam, Democracy and Human Rights Just as Christianity was used to justify the divine right of kings, Islam is used to justify nondemocratic rule; after all, Mohammad held both supreme temporal and reli- gious power when he created the first Muslim communi- ty in Medina in 622. But ideas that provide a strong basis for democracy are also deeply embedded in Islam. The concept of a consultative council, or majlas asshura, goes back to the selection of the first caliphs; and the concept of consensus, or ijmaa, implies free debate. In short, Islam does not preclude or preordain either democracy or authoritarianism, but provides scope for various forms of government that meet the Quran’s requirements for fairness and justice and the equality of all Muslims before God. The Islamic concept of human rights differs from what Humphreys calls the establishment of the individual as “a final criterion value” that has occurred, as he notes, “in a few highly exotic societies, like the modern United States.” The Islamic default settings are male and Muslim. Women in Islam. The default setting in regard to F O C U S 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 8